Research

Belle and Belle II

Belle is an international experiment at the Japanese laboratory for particle physics KEK, which operated from 1999 to 2010 and recorded about 771 million electron positron collisions leading to the production of a B meson pair. These particles and their decays provide deep insights into the physics of the microcosm. In particular, Belle's results on CP violation layed the experimental ground for the 2008 Nobelprize in physics to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. Since 2010 the experiment is being upgraded into the Belle II detector, which will collect physics data from early 2019 and dig even deeper into the mysteries of the universe.

The Belle detector

The Vienna group is leading the design and construction of the silicon vertex detector (SVD) of Belle II. We built SVD layer 5 in our in-house cleanroom and developed the readout electronics for the entire device.

The physics research of the Vienna group focuses on the determination of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements |Vcb| and |Vub| from semileptonic B meson decays on the one hand. The second line of research is the study of low mass dark matter and low mass mediators in the Belle II data in cooperation with the other theoretical and experimental dark matter groups at HEPHY.